We have used a number of PHP frameworks for our PHP projects, both internally and for clients, from roll-our-own frameworks to open-source frameworks. A few years back, we fell instantly in love when we discovered Mojavi for its simplicity and solid implementation. Then the deal became even sweeter when symfony was born. To put it plainly, symfony is to PHP what Rails is to Ruby. It takes the best of Mojavi, Rails, Propel, Ajax and tons of other frameworks and best practices and rolls them into a very effective, practical and well-documented framework. Since its launch, symfony has built up quite a large following, which goes to show how good the framework really is.

We believe symfony can only get better. One of the new additions to the symfony website is a Code Snippets section, which is a code repository for fellow symfony users to post fragments of codes for popular tasks. This is definitely a great resource for users of the framework which we have not seen elsewhere before. And the developers have even released the source code to Snippets so that new users can take the code and learn how to develop such a web application on their own. That’s the spirit that really draws us in to symfony.

Since we started using symfony in a few of our projects, we have also started building up some code fragments that we will readily share with the community. For starters, here’s one on how to send batch emails through symfony.

Many frameworks have come and gone, but symfony has managed to garner a positive reputation for being practical, straightforward and fun to use. Add to that the fact that it is the most well-documented framework in the PHP landscape, symfony is definitely here to stay for a long time.

- Unshamed -

The designer has contacted us explaining that that whole thing is a misunderstanding and that he meant it only as a practice site with no intention of selling it to a real client.

With the new look, we decided we also wanted to change the tone of the website. We wanted the website to not only showcase our services, but also to lend a human voice to the website. And hence, this blog was born.

So how has blogging helped us so far? Well, this blog is still very young, but already we can see some of the benefits that blogging can bring. Case in point, one of the earlier posts about the annoying “border” around embedded Flash objects has gotten itself bookmarked by many fellow surfers. While we were not the direct source of the solution (the credit all goes to Mix-FX) we are glad that we are adding some value to the solution, by pointing people in the right direction while we document our experience in dealing with the same problems.

Blogging can really add much-needed human touch to the website. We feel that it can be beneficial to businesses as the blog creates an informal platform for voicing your opinions on current trends and observations. This is extremely helpful in today’s climate where everything moves at top speed, so the blog can keep your website as up to date as you can possibly keep. Customers, both prospective and existing ones, will be able to see a different (hopefully positive) side of the people behind the company.

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Guess who we support!

There has been a lot of talk about web standards and the benefits they bring to web design and applications. We thought we could post this up to see what it really means to web designers and developers out there (or anyone who believes in WS). So tell us what web standards mean to you in a word or short sentence (no essays please).

We start the ball rolling…

Simplicity

Well, what do you know. It is 6/6/06 today. Freaky for some but another wonderful but tiring day for us and another blog entry to thepixelage blog.

Saw something today, but not sure if this is old news, but it is news to me - Google Sitemap. It allows you to submit all your URLs to Google and you can get detailed reports about the visibility of your web pages on Google search. Here’s what they say about Google Sitemap:

“Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as “spiders” to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.”

Visit Google Sitemaps.

It always feels wonderful when people appreciate the efforts that you put into a website. Better yet, when they not only love the design, but also the codes behind the design.

“It looks great both visually and behind the scenes — beautiful inside and out”

- Unmatched Style

That is really something! The first review we have for this site and it is way cool and what’s more, he got our company name right, thepixelage, one-word, no caps. Thanks Unmatched Style!

If you guys enjoy visiting our site, do vote for us and leave your comments there :).

We are always excited to see websites in a new light. Websites as Graphs (from cool programmer Sala) renders your web page as beautiful graphs. Check out these cool graphs for our home page, portfolio page and the blog page of our website.

Check out what your favourite websites look like! Send us (to blogstuff AT this domain) some cool graphs, and we can feature them here if we think they look really cool.

For every website design or redesign, we not only afford tremendous efforts in coming up with bolder and more refreshing looks, we also explore how best to make use of new features and technologies to better the user experience. With all the hype going around about Ajax , we knew we had to look at Ajax seriously for our new website revamp. However, being our usual practical selves, we always made sure the use of new cool features, such as Ajax, is justified. Otherwise, the coolest features will still get thrown out the window if we cannot justify that the benefits are well worth the efforts.

So, instead of drowning the entire website in Ajax, we knew we would be better off focusing our efforts on the one section that would make the most sense using Ajax. We immediately saw that our Portfolio section was high on the list of being the most likely candidate to benefit from the Ajax feature. We decided that we could use Ajax to update parts of the Portfolio page without refreshing the entire page. This meant that our visitors will be able to enjoy a more seamless experience while browsing through our sample works. Hovering over the links for the projects, a nice little tooltip appears, drawing information through Ajax to display a thumbnail of the screenshot alongside bite-sized information. Clicking on the links, the larger screenshot and project details get retrieved, again via Ajax, and displayed in the main area. The benefits brought about by Ajax is a much more responsive page than using the traditional method of reloading entire pages.

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We have removed the original content of this post because the designer has finally decided to redesign his client’s site with his own design, even though we have not gotten any apology from the designer for copying our site design in the first place. Our intention in fingering copycats on this blog is never to humiliate the designers. Rather, we hope to make them realise that they cannot get away with simply ripping off someone else’s designs, and that they should respect others’ works and learn to love their own. Getting inspired by someone else’s work is one thing; simply ripping it off is quite another.